The Cornish Rich List

Not only are the Cornish recognised internationally by UNESCO as leaders in the ancient and modern world of mining and minerals the fundamental ingredient of any rich list. The Cornish are also widely recognised for their contribution towards the recovery of minerals in the building of nations such as America, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. Cornish miners and their families have extended the horizon of ‘Cornish’ by hard work and an independent spirit.

With all its faults, the Cornish are, and will remain, an integral part of the British-American world.

There is still a lot to be done. A revision to manage the debt ridden financial system to the level of an integral part of a rich and prosperous democracy, of the people by the people and for the people is generally accepted as a priority. We are all learning to consider the unintended consequences of our actions and inactions. We need more transparency with an absolute right to guaranteed equality before the law and a greater effort to establish world peace without imperial motives. We are not looking for enemies. A nuclear conflict anywhere is sure to have an adverse impact on the environment everywhere.

With genuine progress, future generations may consider our debts a price worth paying for our legacy to them of an advanced hi-tech civilisation with effective democracy just as we now pay for, and benefit from, the inventions of the industrial revolution handed down to us by the creative efforts of Cornish and many other British/American pioneers through peace and war in the past.

In 1337, Cornish minerals attracted the attention of the English Monarchy. They created the Duchy of Cornwall with the constitutional function of providing an income for the heir to the throne and recognised the national identity of the Cornish by providing the Duke with the powers of the government of Cornwall. As top of the Cornish Rich List, the Duke of Cornwall has strangely been excluded from the Sunday Times Rich List published 29th April 2012. English law is also ambiguous. The original English constitutional Duchy of Cornwall Charters remain in force but, the Duchy is now officially presented as if it were private and British while the original Cornish inhabitants of Britain are presented as if they were English.

Consequently, our homeland nation looks to the example of the American system of devolved democracy of elected leaders in its internal states. The individual united states are not equal in size. They are areas of local self-government established on the basis of historical developments as in the case of the smaller original thirteen states (the stripes on the union flag) compared with the much larger states such as California and Texas. The English national majority of Britain should swallow its pride, stop hiding Cornish economic history, and recognise the history and language of the original indigenous Cornish British. In the case of Cornwall, generations of Cornish people have provided an historic and inestimable financial service to the Crown and are, by international standards, deserving a similar democratic arrangement to that prevailing in the United States of America.